Tag: seabirds

We all know that diet can have a big impact on our health, and the same is true for the wildlife around us. Some animals adapt to new food resources, often bringing them into our everyday, where we see them scavenging for morsels. Recent Institute graduate Dr Nina O’Hanlon talks about her research into gull diet and how it is affecting their colonies.

Summer can be a quiet time around the Institute with many of our researchers out in the field collecting data, away at conferences, or off on holiday. So, before we get back to our usual programme of stimulating research—and you are in for some treats soon—we thought we would kick back and take it easy with some cake. But these are no ordinary cakes, […]

What can herring gulls tell us about the health of our seas? As it turns out, potentially quite a lot. Being top predators, seabirds act as conspicuous signals of what is going on beneath the waves, and PhD student Nina O’Hanlon (@Nina_OHanlon)—a member of the institute’s Seabird Interest Group—thinks that the common herring gull could act as an ideal monitor […]

This is the first in our series of Naturally Speaking Shorts where we interview visiting and IBAHCM researchers about their work and how they ended up in science. In this episode, we interview University of Glasgow alumnus, Dr. Richard Phillips (British Antarctic Survey), about his work with albatrosses in South Georgia and his advice for young ecologists entering the field. Tune […]

Ecologists have long tried to understand what animals get up to when they’re not being observed. GPS technologies have enabled unprecedented remote-tracking, but some behaviours – such as diet – are a little more tricky to track. In this post James Grecian (@JamesGrecian), a marine ecologist at the Institute, discusses a technique he uses to track the diet of seabirds across some of the world’s most remote oceans; one that relies […]